Maha Bali's blog has now moved to http://blog.mahabali.me

Tag Archives: autoethnography

One of the interesting paradoxes about being liberal is that liberal thinking can be intolerant. I used to call this being closed-minded about being open-minded. When tolerating different perspectives technically implies being open to perspectives that are not even tolerant of ours… Doesn’t it?

But does it mean it’s ok for tolerant people to be tolerant of intolerance? Can we be tolerant of nazi thinking, for example? Can we be tolerant of racism? Probably not, right?

So being open-minded is nuanced. I agree with Martin Weller, for example, in “you don’t get openness for nothing“, where he suggests that research about open edu or MOOCs should in turn be published in open-access venus. He says he is not dogmatic about openness for every single thing, but this is one he’s a “hard-liner” about. I agree.

Regarding rhizo14 research… I think true openness would respect some people’s right to not want to be open and listen to their concerns, even if the majority of vocal people prefer openness. Because even though I would personally prefer openness, I feel that (indirectly) imposing openness can exclude some people.

I perceive openness in the case of rhizo14 autoethnography to mean “openness to diverse perspectives and levels of openness” which means the collective work can have a level of openness but individuals can choose varying levels of openness, say how they wish to be attributed, etc.

I wrote my last post on mess to talk about this indirectly among other things.

The fact that something fits my personal philosophy and my values, that i think it was ok, does not mean it does not offend, hurt, bother, scare, or otherwise disagree with, other people. And I need to be open-minded about that. Don’t we all?

ADDED 10 mins later

The most surreal thing just happened. An article I wrote for Al-Fanar was just republished in a place called Open Democracywithout my permission AND copyrighted, and told if someone wants to republish to contact them. Not me. What is more, they got my bio off my blog, but never thought to tweet me to ask permission! I want my stuff to be CC but not to be republished without my knowledge! Am I crazy here? What if I disagreed with the values of the other publication?